Web scraping has become incredibly popular in recent years, but many people still don’t understand how it works. Simply put, it is a procedure to extract information from websites. Similar to other digital and innovative things, web scraping has overgrown with various misconceptions. To help you understand web scraping better, we decided to bust several common myths about this activity.
3 misconceptions about webscraping
- It’s illegal.
Actually, it isn’t as there is no law to prohibit web scraping. However, it is necessary to follow the rules of the site you are scraping as well as general ethical guides. If you violate the rules an owner of the website has set, it means you break the law. It is forbidden to gather personal information as it is usually protected not only by the website but also by the law. As long as you follow the rules of the game, you don’t do anything illegal.
Also check– Web scraping Java
- All websites can be scraped.
Many websites are almost impossible for scraping tools to collect data. In fact, there are a lot of ways to protect a website from scraping bots. Though there’s no proven technology that can stop a well-developed scraper from gathering data, some websites’ owners don’t welcome this activity. If the site actively defends itself from scrapers then it’s not a great idea to collect data from it anyway.
- You need to code.
Many people believe that it is impossible to perform web scraping if you aren’t an experienced programmer. However, it isn’t true as there are well-designed software packages that don’t make you write any code. Try finddatalab.com as this web scraper service doesn’t require coding. Moreover, it is an all-inclusive solution, which means you shouldn’t worry about anything. They do all the technical work, clean collected data, and transform it into easy-to-use formats.
